For the record, the terms "theft" and "steal" are not necessarily my words when it comes to describing some of the activities that take place on the Internet. However, these terms appear to be a consistent and prominent part of an industry's effort to highlight a problem. I assume that they chose these terms creatively for the intrinsic emotional value the words carry in order to indicate the seriousness of the problem.

Now, I agree that it is important for people to understand how what they are doing is illegal. But we also cannot ignore people and are fully aware of the legal consequences of such actions and sometimes, those people, act as if though they are targets of some kind of conspiracy to keep them from doing something they feel they have the right to do.

As for your challenge to find a word that could accurately describe the activities I would choose the word: Clandestine and more importantly the term clandestine-activity. I would add that it is on this basis the industry has gone after many peer-to-peer operations.

For those in our audience, clandestine = Kept or done in secret, often in order to conceal an illicit or improper purpose.

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Lee Evans, President
LeeWare Development
http://www.leeware.com